A Standing Chill

This might be all over the place. It was being written in my head as I was waking up. I didn't quite realize it was until I was crawling out of bed, heading for the computer thinking, 'I should blog this.' Now, more awake, I'm thinking I don't really want to. I'm tired, I don't feel well, and I have not had coffee yet, plus I don't have as clear a picture of this blog as my half-asleep self did. But, I find myself at the keyboard anyway, so here we go...

Some mornings I wake up with a feeling of anxiety deep in my stomach. This morning, for example, as I lie awake knowing that I still had an hour before my alarm was to go off, I tried to shut my mind off, tried to ignore the swirling in my stomach but to no avail. The more I tried, the more the anxiety grew and grew until it was strong enough to have a voice. The voice of anxiety usually says the same thing, or variations on the same theme.

"You are going to die someday."

Ugh. Yes.

Now I'm wondering if I should calm any fears here for my sanity. I'm using some creative license here in this blog. I don't actually hear any voice in my head other than my own.

Anyway, the reality of mortality slowly began to creep in when my grandfather died (less than a month after the twin towers fell) in 2001. I think on some level every young person knows that everyone dies. But, they don't quite apply it to themselves or to the people they know personally until they are old enough to process the information. I know this was the case with me. As I gradually began to understand that death wasn't something that happened to other people but to everyone, I needed help fully understanding it and dealing with its reality, as I think most people do. I'd already had a copy of a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening by Stephen Batchelor and I began reading it in the span between the deaths of 3000 strangers and my beloved grandfather.

The book was a great help to me. The one thing I took from it was this: suffering comes from our attempts at running from and hiding from the reality of death. Once we accept its inevitability, really accept it, we can move toward peace and enlightenment. It was such a blow to my mind, a good one, that when my grandfather passed, I was more able than I might otherwise have been to really celebrate his life and not mourn his death.

But in those hours between sleep and awareness, particularly when the anxiety of unknown cause is swirling in my stomach and my brain tries to fill in a reason while I try to fall back asleep, I succumb to a kind of fear, a despair. We might have to accept that death is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we have to be comfortable with it.

Actually, yes it does. And that's the struggle.

This isn't an argument for or against the existence of a god or an afterlife (either of which could exist without the other), just the thought that I had as I got out of bed. It was that I'm just as human as anyone else. I get the fear. I have it. Although I believe that after I die, I wink from existence as though I'd never been, the thought can be crushing.

It why when I'm told by believers that they do not believe out of fear of death, I scoff. I'm just as human as they and I know what my motivations would be in believing in a god who, for the small price of belief, would give me eternal life. For all that I'm told that it's more humble to believe in something greater than yourself, I think it is also humble to believe that death is death, and that we don't get to live forever, especially after living in a world on which we see everything on a cycle of life and death.

Sometimes life can take on a pointlessness in the knowledge that it all ends. The struggle is to get back to that acceptance of inevitability and move it on to a kind of comfort in the idea. It's part of the cycle of all things. Even this awesome universe will someday cease to be. Put in that light, comparing my insignificant self, my body and whatever else makes me me, with that of the universe, putting us both on the same path of life and death is comforting.

Anyway, that was my thought upon waking, and now I must be off to cause myself pain in the name of losing inches and hopefully someday having the fabulous bod I've always wanted. I won't ever be a 20-something again, but it ain't over 'til it's over :)

Love the Earth

My submissions to Imogen Heap's "Love the Earth."